The Greenwood public school system is beefing up its classroom requirements for the coming year.
Officials hope the new system will add rigor to classrooms and help raise academic standards.
"The Mississippi Department of Education decided to add more rigor in the curriculum," said Dr. Jennifer Wilson, director of curriculum, instruction, testing and professional development for the school district. "Every five years the curriculum frameworks are revised."
The department of education determined that students needed more rigorous requirements to prepare for post-secondary education, Wilson said. The state also wanted state schools to be more competitive nationwide, she said.
A teaching model called Normal L. Webb's Depth of Knowledge is being used to help teachers make the curriculum more challenging, Wilson said.
The model comes from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and covers different cognitive levels, Wilson said.
Level one is basic recall, level two is basic reasoning and level three is strategic thinking, Wilson said.
"Principals and trainers will provide sessions for teachers on Webb's Depth of Knowledge and the new curriculum frameworks. Some of those training sessions have already taken place," Wilson said. "The new assessment will be live next year."
Principal Brenda Brown of W.C. Williams Elementary School said her school has had one session of training. "We are just starting to implement," Brown said.
Brown said the new model will help teachers in their lesson plans and broaden student knowledge.
Teachers currently test second- through eighth-grade students with the Mississippi Curriculum Test (MCT). High school students taking Algebra I, Biology I, English II and U.S. history classes are evaluated with the Subject Area Testing Program.
The new teaching model will help teachers better prepare students for these tests.
Teachers will use it to prepare students to take the new version of the MCT, or the MCT II, in the spring of 2008, when it goes live for the state, said Kaye McCrory, principal of Bankston Elementary School.
The Mississippi Department of Education is creating a completely new curriculum for math and language statewide for the next school year, Brown said.
